


Stuck On My Eyes

by sullenhearts



Category: Trainspotting (Movies), Trainspotting Series - Irvine Welsh, t2: trainspotting
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-28 06:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11412264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullenhearts/pseuds/sullenhearts
Summary: Title taken from David Bowie'sFive Years. Seemed appropriate. Set in the film, obviously





	Stuck On My Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from David Bowie's _Five Years_. Seemed appropriate. Set in the film, obviously

“I’m going to bed,” Veronika says, draining her glass and putting it down on the table. She stands up, picks her way across to us, and leans down to silently kiss Simon’s cheek. “Goodnight, Mark.”

“Night,” I say, smiling up at her.

Her eyelids flicker. She moves across the floor without making a noise, not even a shuffle on the terrible carpet. 

We’re alone. Simon and me, me and Simon. Alone for the first time in twenty years. 

He could kill me. He might reach out, wrap one or both hands around my throat, those thick fingers squeezing tighter and tighter until my sight goes runny and I’m pulling at his hands, gasping for breath, pleading for my life. Or he might have a knife, just a wee three inch blade, you know, but he’d go deep enough to do some harm. Enough harm to kill me? I’m considering this when Veronika appears again, the lamp next to Simon suddenly shaded by her hips and cunt, or, well, where they would be if she wasn’t dressed.

“Be safe, boys,” she says, and drops a condom into Sickboy’s hand. Then she pads away again.

A laugh catches in my throat and dies. 

Simon coughs, looking the most embarrassed I think I’ve ever seen him look. He palms the packet and slips it into a pocket, then chugs some beer, trying to not look as if his missus has just basically told us to have sex. He won’t look at me. He’ll look at all the dark corners of this room except at me.

It’s not like the thought has never crossed my mind. Come on, back in the day Sickboy was pretty, whippet thin, all that bleached blonde hair adding to the innocence. He used to be blonde, you know, as a kid. White blonde, wide eyed, looking the very picture of innocence. “Naw, miss, I didnae do nothin’,” he’d say, turning the eyes on Miss England, and before I knew it I was on the way to the headmistress’ office with nothing to say for myself. 

Then he hit puberty – late, the soft shite – and his hair went muddy, dark blonde, and then finally just mousy. That’s when he started bleaching it. The first time he didn’t leave it on long enough and it turned orange. That was a fucking laugh. Fucking knobhead.

“At least I didn’t use me ma’s Domestos, you fuckers,” he said on the bus when we were calling him Carrot Top and when Spud asked him if he’d dyed his pubes too, and I think he thought he’d won, only that just made us laugh more. I nearly fell down the stairs and broke my fucking neck. He wasn’t embarrassed, though, that’s my point. He’s never been embarrassed, only it kind of suits him, I quite like it. 

I keep looking at him, waiting while he closes his fingers round the shiny red packet and prays to some kind of god that must be residing in the ceiling there, while he bites a thumbnail and sighs loudly, while he looks at his jeans and the pool table and then finally, finally, turns to me.

“It’s not what you think,” he says.

“No? What do I think?”

“Someone can’t just disappear for twenty years and then come back and expect everything to be the same.”

“Nothing’s the same, Simon. Not even your fucking name.”

“Aye, well, no point in having a matching nickname when the wee cunt you matched with has stolen sixteen grand off you and fucked off.” He looks so petulant that I want to laugh. 

“I never stole sixteen grand off you personally, Simon. Off the collective, I stole the whole lot, sure, but what you’re forgetting is that I am a member of that collective too, so are you saying I stole sixteen grand off myself? Come on, that’s just nonsense. I stole four grand off you personally, _Simon_ , so sure, you can be fucking angry about that if you want to be, but don’t tell me that you’re not just pissed off that –”

“Shut up, Rents, for the love of Christ shut up.” He reaches over and puts his hand over my mouth. “Yeah, I probably would’ve fucking done it too, if I’d woken up and thought I could get the bag off Begbie without losing my eyes in the meantime. But you can’t tell me that you wouldn’t still be pissed off about it if I had.”

I shrug, his hand still over my mouth, my eyes still on him. He’s moved closer, though, so that his knee is next to mine. He’s got smarter while I’ve been away. I suppose cocaine expects a more debonair look than skag. I like it; the tailored shirt and those jeans that are supposed to look lived in from the minute you buy them. He’s chunkier than he used to be, too, although he’d probably say the same about me and anyway, I like that, too. 

His eyes flicker and he moves his hand away. I open my mouth but I’m not that sure what I’m going to say, I just don’t like the silence, I just want to fill it with something, anything, which is awful because silence used to be okay between us and now it isn’t, but that all doesn’t matter because he says,

“I’ve a wee touch of the hepatitis.”

I blink.

“That’s why she brought the johnny, you know, just in case. Looking out for your wellbeing, Rents, and she barely even knows you.” He’s trying for funny but it dies between us and instead we just gaze at each other wide eyed like ten year olds about to be told off. 

“What kind?” I ask. 

“C. It’s chronic, won’t go away.”

“From needles.”

“From needles,” he nods. “No, I don’t know whose. Suppose that’s why I went on the charlie instead, you know?” He laughs bitterly. “Less risk that way.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. 

“Suppose you’re still clean as a whistle? I don’t know how you do it, Mark. Made of Teflon or some shite.”

“I got clean, mate,” I say, stung. “Hard to catch anything when you’re not misusing needles.”

“Easy to get clean when you’ve sixteen grand to do it on, eh?”

“Fourteen,” I remind him. “I left some for Spud.”

“Aye,” he sighs. “He thought it was fucking Christmas. He’s lucky he never got robbed for it.”

“Mmm? You decided to leave him alone, did you?”

“Fuck off, I wouldn’t. He’s a mate, isn’t he?”

“I’m not sure you know what mates means, Simon.”

“You’re sure a fucking preachy bastard these days, Mark.”

I don’t say anything. 

“I can’t forgive you,” Sickboy says eventually. “I tried, about ten years ago. I was in rehab and they kept doing all that touchy feely shite, where we talk to a chair and pretend it’s the people we’ve let down and all of that.”

He doesn’t know but I’ve done that therapy myself. I was already clean when I took the money, but I wasn’t healed from all the crap I’d put myself through. I wasn’t over the terrible things I’d done and seen. Angela, Dawn, Tommy, all of them haunted my dreams and presented themselves in daily life. I used to see Angela all the time on a train I took to work. I would argue with Tommy every night in my dreams, knocking needles out of his hands and pulling tourniquets off his arms. And when my own children were born, red and angry and perfectly new, eyes screwed shut against the light of the outside world, I saw Dawn in my arms instead of them, and I wondered how the fuck I could ever think that I would be anything like a good father. I’ve tried my best, of course I have, but I’m pretty sure I’ve failed them, in one way or another.

“I never asked you to,” I say to Simon, coming back to him, tearing my mind out of the past twenty years, trying to focus on him again.

“Don’t frown at me, Rents,” he says. “Pretty boy like you always wants forgiveness.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I say. A flicker of anger flares, I suddenly don’t know why I’m sitting here, why I’m bothering. I only came to say goodbye to my Ma; I don’t owe any of these boys anything. Tommy, yes. Spud, maybe. Definitely not Begbie and definitely, definitely not Sickboy. 

I move, getting up. I can see myself out, forget this, forget him –

He grabs my wrist, his grip stronger than I remember. I sit back down, caught off balance, closer to him now, close enough to feel his breath on my cheek.

“I don’t forgive you,” he says. “But I probably would’ve done the same thing, given the chance. Anything to get out of this shithole, aye?”

It’s not just about the town. It’s not about the town at all. All towns have awful parts like this. I’ve seen them all – Miami, Oregon, LA, even the less salubrious parts of Provence. The difference there was that I didn’t know anyone to drag me down, to get me back into that life, their life, until such a time as they tried to break out and I dragged them back down with me, until we were all in too much of a cycle to ever escape. That’s what the money gave me. A chance. 

A chance that I wanted to give Simon, that I wanted to open up something for him to help him get out of this, out of his cycle. Yeah, it might come with a pretty girl and hookers on tap, but the amount of coke he forces up his nose and the deadness in his eyes shows me what I wanted to know.

“Come with me,” I say. “You and Veronika. She’s a pretty girl, she can start again, if she’d got with us.”

“Where do you want to go?” he asks, his fingers still wrapped around my wrist, but more gently now, less like he wants to wrap them round my throat. 

“Anywhere you want,” I say softly. “I’ve got money. The world is your oyster, Simon.” 

He closes his eyes, nods just once, and then he kisses me.


End file.
